Transcript

Robyn Williams: The work being done on both plant and animal DNA is very exciting stuff, and in Lismore they're doing the DNA on great big whales. It's being done in northern NSW, for all sorts of good reasons. Martin Elphinstone from the Southern Cross University says first you must find your whale.

Martin Elphinstone: We pop down to Ballina or Cape Byron and head out from the Richmond River at Ballina or from Cape Byron itself in the National Parks in the Wildlife Service boat or in fact, in our own Southern Cross University research boat.

Robyn Williams: So, you lean out the side of the boat and grab a piece of whale and get some genes?

Martin Elphinstone: Indeed we do. We actually have a modified little aquarium fish scoop net on the end of a long pole and that's exactly what we're doing. We lean over the front of the boat and scoop up the whale skin from the whales that have swum by. We actually wait for them to breech or tail slap or fin slap, because that's the point at which they seem to shed their skin.

Robyn Williams: I see, the skin actually comes off.

Martin Elphinstone: Yes, we don't actually harpoon the whale or anything. The skin is being shed as the whale's migrating on its journey either north or south and it tends to float around in the water for ten or fifteen minutes, and we whiz in after the whale's gone by and we hunt around, and more often than not we find a bit of skin floating around.

Robyn Williams: And these are humpback are they?

Martin Elphinstone: They are. Yeah, the humpback whales on their annual migration north from the Antarctic around about June and then towards the Great Barrier Reef waters for calving and then they head back around August/September, back to the Antarctic for their summer.

Robyn Williams: So you catch them on the way back as well.

Martin Elphinstone: Yeah, although most of the effort is concentrated in a couple of weeks in June when they seem to be fairly bunched up on their way north. On their way back they tend to spread out a bit more.

Robyn Williams: Why do you want to collect their genes?

Martin Elphinstone: Well, it's a way of actually identifying individuals. In the past, the only way people have had to identify individual humpbacks is by looking at fin markings upon their tail flips and on their body as well. They collect various markings throughout their years in the sea either from orca attacks, sometimes just from their markings, their natural markings, they've got different colours. But this is a bit problematic because markings tend to change; obviously from one year to the next you might get a whale which has suffered an attack by a killer whale and so the markings change and you can't necessarily pick them up. So this is a way of actually identifying individuals precisely so you can follow them from one year to the next. And indeed from one geographical region to the next as well.

Robyn Williams: Before you tell me about the point of identification, I would have thought a killer whale is on a fool's errand actually to try and take a chunk out of a humpback.

Martin Elphinstone: Yeah, that's a bit like lions on the Serengeti, they don't tend to go for the really healthy strong zebras and antelopes, but the orcas tend to go for the old and sick or the very young humpbacks.

Robyn Williams: So occasionally they can eat whales?

Martin Elphinstone: Yeah, and so I think it tends to be more of the younger, smaller ones or the old sicker ones,yeah.

Robyn Williams: So having collected the DNA fingerprint do you find that you come across the individuals again and again as they come past?

Martin Elphinstone: Well, this is the first year we have actually started doing the DNA fingerprinting and what we're aiming is to actually build up a data base so that we can do this and follow on from one year to the next. The first year is actually the hardest. The first few years are the hardest because we actually have to try and match up the DNA fingerprint with the photographic identification that's already been gathered. And the photo ID's have picked up repeat visits from whales over the years and we are hoping that with the genetic database it'll be much easier to get a more accurate picture of how often they are coming back and how frequently. And yeah, where in fact they're going to from here.

Robyn Williams: Do you have similar collections of fingerprints, DNA fingerprints, overseas that you can actually get in touch with colleagues in other countries and say, "Hey, we've got this whale that's come around for the third time".

Martin Elphinstone: Yes, that's exactly right. The other beauty of the DNA fingerprinting technology is that it's very easily standardised amongst the different laboratories, and we're in fact working on a recommendation of this conference that was held in Brisbane a couple of years ago now, where there was an international humpback whale research conference and they recommended at that conference that a standardised set of DNA markers be adopted for this fingerprinting process, and that these markers become integrated with the photographic ID database.

Now we're the first lab as far as I'm aware, at least in the Southern Hemisphere, that are doing this integrating process. We've set up all ten standard markers that were recommended by the conference two years ago and started applying those to the local whales. So yes, we will be able to compare precisely our results with the results obtained from laboratories in NZ, South Africa, and South America and say, Oh, look, this is the whale that was over there in South Africa three years ago you know, and suddenly it's started coming up the east coast. I mean we don't know whether that's going to happen but this is the point of the basic research, to actually generate this sort of database so that in future years someone can take a skin sample from South America or Tonga and say, Oh, that was a whale that was heading up the Great Barrier Reef three years ago.

Robyn Williams: And I suppose knowing the individual, you should also get a feeling for the population size and how they're conserved?

Martin Elphinstone: That's exactly right. Yeah, this sort of genetic data also allows us to make assessments of population size, also parentage analysis. It's exactly the same technology that police are using in their forensic work to identify individuals at crime scenes, so we can actually also assess whether the individuals within pods are related to one another; whether the young in the pods are accompanied by both parents or one parent or perhaps not even a parent - perhaps an aunt or an uncle. So it enables us to look at things like family structure as well as the overall population structure around the world and their migration habits.

Robyn Williams: And you can help. They're raising sponsorship at Southern Cross University for the whale project with whale races and spotting the whale and naming it. Seriously. And don't worry, it's all quite safe.